


Called To The Carpet

by rebelmeg



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Avengers Family, Avengers Tower, First Impressions Are Hard To Get Over, Gen, Howard Stark's A+ Parenting, Natasha Is a Good Bro, Steve Rogers Feels, Tony Stark Feels, making friends is hard
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-20
Updated: 2017-03-20
Packaged: 2018-10-08 14:23:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,108
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10388748
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rebelmeg/pseuds/rebelmeg
Summary: Tony and Steve DO NOT GET ALONG.  Going through the Battle of New York didn't smooth all the ruffled feathers.  It takes some scolding from Mother Hen Natasha to get them to stop being children.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This is set very shortly after Avengers, in the newly rebuilt Avengers Tower. Tony made suites for everyone, and while he has all the best intentions, he doesn't always explain it very well and Steve gets his hackles up. I could not compose this argument for the life of me, so we're jumping right in mid-argument, mmkay?

Steve could feel his face getting red as the volume of the argument between himself and Tony started to reach shouting levels. They were trading barbs, sharp and pointed and meant to hurt with increasing frequency and intent to injure, and all of it had apparently finally broken through Natasha's "acceptable noise" threshold. She snapped her book shut (a thick, leather-bound monstrosity with a Russian title stamped in gold across the spine) and stood abruptly from the armchair she was sitting in across the room. “Oh, for the love of—Steven Grant Rogers.”

_Damn. It._ Without even thinking, without even the slightest _glimmer_ of hesitation, Steve stood up straight so fast that his back cracked, and it was all he could do not to blurt out, ‘yes, ma’am?’

He was immediately fourteen years old again, being scolded by his sweet-as-sugar, sharp-as-knives Irish ma. It did not matter that he was standing, over seventy years later, in the communal living room of the Avengers Tower, in front of a red-haired Russian assassin. He might as well have been standing in the shabby front room of the apartment he and his ma lived in his entire life. And he _was_ being scolded.

Natasha didn’t even seem to notice that Steve had reverted to a teenager in the space of a second, and she was fixing him with a stern look. “Your friend Tony has been kind enough to offer you a place to live here, if you should ever like to, and you are being incredibly rude. You apologize to him right now, and tell him thank you.” Her eyes were flashing in a way that just dared him to protest, and he knew better than to try when a woman looked at him like that. A brief image of Peggy pointing a gun at him popped across his mind's eye.

Feeling a flush crawl up his neck, Steve kept standing ramrod straight even as his eyes stayed mostly on the carpet, darting up once or twice to Tony’s baffled face while he mumbled and stuttered his way through an apology and expression of thanks.

Natasha nodded at him, “Good. Now, Anthony Edward Stark.”

Tony blinked in surprise, and Steve felt a pleasant little curl in his stomach when the other man, instead of straightening up, hunched his shoulders, his expression turning cowed instead of defiant or taunting.

“Your friend Steve has been having a hard time lately, and while it is a very nice thing you are doing to make him welcome in your home, trying to pick a fight with him was very rude and certainly wouldn’t make him want to accept your offer. Apologize to him for your behavior immediately.”

Lacking every bit of his usual conversational ease, Tony stumbled his way through an apology with no more eloquence than Steve’d had, looking between Natasha, Steve, and the carpet with alarming frequency. The silence when he finished lasted exactly four seconds, and it was the most uncomfortable four seconds of Steve's life.

“Good. Now that that’s over with, I’m going to go to my room, and you two are going to sit nicely on the couch and talk to each other like friends do for at least ten minutes, then you may be excused.” 

With a whirl of her red hair, Natasha turned on her heel and stalked out of the room, leaving behind her two grown men that were shrouded in a blanket of shame and chastening.

There was awkward silence for a minute as the two avoided looking at each other, then Steve shuffled his feet, his hands going in his pockets. “Felt exactly like I was being called to the carpet by my ma.” He mumbled.

Tony nodded, clearly struggling to get his brain around what had just happened. “Jarvis, before he was JARVIS,” His hand flicked at the ceiling in reference to the AI, “Used to get after me like that. I’d mouth off to my dad and he’d give me a dressing down and make me feel bad and tell me to go apologize. Dad never cared, but Jarvis sure did.”

Abruptly, Steve turned to look at Tony. And it was with, perhaps not completely new eyes, but with a new perspective nevertheless.

He hadn’t ever really _thought_ about what it would have been like, to have Howard for a father. Everything he’d heard about the man had made it quite clear that being a father had not been something Howard had succeeded at by any measure. A businessman, an inventor, a scientist, he had been all of those things with great success… but he had been a failure as a father.

Maybe Steve had been too quick to think of Tony solely as the annoying man that always got his hackles up, without considering that there had to have been a reason, or a lot of reasons, that he was the way he was.

New shame flooded through him when he realized that it had taken Natasha treating them like children for Steve to finally see that.

“I…” Tony said, then cleared his throat. “I know things have been hard. That everything has been hard, since you woke up. I’m sorry I haven’t been more… less of a dick.”

A little flicker of a smile tugged at Steve’s mouth. “Maybe… we can work on that together. Be… better. With each other. Maybe try to be… friends? Or something?” 

Tony had a little smile playing at the corner of his mouth, too. He glanced at his watch. “We’ll have to. We still have eight more minutes before we’re excused.”

Steve chuckled in spite of himself, and Tony finally smiled for real, and when they left the room at the same time fifteen minutes later, it was with a sensation of having cleared the air and started afresh. They weren’t friends yet. It would take more than seventeen minutes of awkwardly amiable conversation about motorcycles and cars ( _super_ mature, Steve knew) for them to be able to move past their default guarded reactions around one another to get to that point. 

But it definitely wasn’t a bad start.

________________________________________

"Ms. Romanov?"

Natasha's head came up as Tony's AI addressed her. That wasn't ever going to be not weird. "Yes, JARVIS?"

"I thought you might like to know, Sir and Captain Rogers did as you requested and engaged in civil conversation for seven minutes longer than the required time. They have just parted ways, and seem to be one somewhat friendlier terms."

A small grin curved Natasha's lips. "That's good to know. Thank you."

"You're welcome, Ms. Romanov. And, might I say, thank _you_."


End file.
